The dacha in the country outside Moscow, the self-absorbed extended family living there oblivious to events in the outside world, the visitor whose energy and mystery stir this nest of gentlefolk -- Burnt by the Sun has the air of something Chekhov or Turgenev might have imagined.
Might have imagined, that is, if he had lived in the age of Stalin. For the year is 1936, and the central figure of Nikita Mikhalkov's marvelous film, which won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is an old Bolshevik at terrible risk, Sergei Kotov (played by the director himself). Lost in contentment...
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